One of Israel’s disadvantages throughout the Gaza war has been that Hamas’s actions are so demonic that they are genuinely difficult to talk about. Videos must be edited and censored, descriptions of scenes must be handled with care and loaded with euphemisms. The full extent of Palestinian crimes is obscured by the fundamental decency of Hamas’s victims and targets.
Overnight, Gaza’s governing force added a new example, a reminder of its savagery.
Yesterday began with the clock ticking down on President Trump’s deadline for Hamas to continue returning the bodies of its victims to Israel. The terror group announced that it would be returning another body that evening.
Meanwhile, Hamas set to work staging a grotesque scene. Its operatives dug a hole, then retrieved a body bag from a nearby building and threw the body bag into the hole. The operatives then buried the body bag. Soon, Hamas used an excavator to dig up its own hole, pretending to “discover” the remains it had just buried.
Hamas then returned those remains. It turned out that they belonged not to one of the missing bodies but to a different murdered hostage whose partial remains were already recovered by the IDF, Ofir Tzarfati.
Hamas took pieces of a body, buried them, dug them up, then pretended they belonged to someone else.
An IDF drone filmed the whole thing. It was done in broad daylight, reportedly with the Red Cross there for at least part of the pre-ruse process.
American media have been slow to report the story, but you can almost understand the hesitation: Without the video of the whole incident, one would find the story difficult to believe. The monstrousness of it all does not fit within the framework of human activity through which we examine modern conflict.
There are two points worth emphasizing here. The first is that while this is a uniquely disturbing scene, it is not the first time in this war or even since the cease-fire that Hamas has played with corpses.
Two weeks ago, Hamas handed over what it said was the body of an Israeli hostage but which turned out to be a Gazan body dressed up in an IDF uniform. That incident echoed one in February in which Hamas returned what it said was the body of Shiri Bibas, a hostage the Palestinians had taken on October 7 along with her very young children (her husband was also taken and held separately). But it wasn’t Shiri Bibas; it was an unidentified Palestinian.
Arguably the most egregious such case also involved the Bibas family in that same incident. That day, Hamas organized a macabre ceremony to hand over the bodies of Shiri, her two young sons, and a fourth murdered hostage. Hamas members then paraded the coffins of the hostages, including the young children.
Kfir Bibas was nine months old when kidnapped by Palestinians, and his older brother Ariel was 4 years old. Their plight came to symbolize the barbaric nature of the Palestinian terrorists who invaded Israel on that day. Hamas also claimed that the Bibases had been killed by an Israeli airstrike, but that was a lie: Once the bodies were returned and examined, it turned out their Palestinian captors had murdered the children with their own hands and then mutilated the corpses to try to hide what they’d done.
Again, there really aren’t adequate words for all this. Modern language was not developed in the expectation that humans were still capable of the kind of sadism Hamas practices regularly.
The second point is that all those in the West who have been cheerleading Hamas—and that is indeed what most demonstrators in the U.S. and Europe have been doing—have shown not just hatred for Jews but complete disregard for the humanity of Palestinian civilians. Hamas plays with their corpses, too. Anyone who believes that any remnant of Hamas should be in a position of power in Gaza is consigning Palestinians to precisely this tyrannical madness.
